PROGRESSIVISM

Progressivism in American education began as a reaction against the formalism and verbalism
of traditional schooling. 'The Progressive Education Association, organized in 1919 enlisted a
variety of members from experimental private schools and colleges of education. While many of
the initial participants in progressive education were individuals who were looking for innovative
approaches to education that would liberate the child's energies, many of its later members
were associated with John Dewey's Experimentalist philosophy.

SOURCES OF PROGRESSIVISM
Although the Progressive Education Association was formally established in the early twentieth
century, its antecedents go back as far as the eighteenth century Enlightenment. Like the
philosophes of the Age of Reason, modern progressives emphasized the concept of Progress:
that is, they believed that man is capable of improving and perfecting his environment by
applying human intelligence and the scientific method to the problems that arise in personal and
social life. Like Rousseau, the progressives rejected notions of human depravity and believed
that man is basically benevolent.
Progressivism was also rooted in the spirit of social reform which was part uf the early twentieth
century progressive movement in American politics. As a socio-political movement,
Progressivism held that human society could be refashioned by political means. Such American
political programs as Woodrow Wilson's "New Freedom," 'Theodore Roosevelt's "New
Nationalism," and Robert Lafollette's "Wisconsin Idea" varied in their particulars, but shared the
common concern that the emerging corporate society should be ordered to function
democratically tor the benefit of all Americans. The leaders in progressive politics represented
what was essentially the middle-class orientation to reform, characterized by gradual change
through legislation and peaceful social innovation through education.
American educational progressives could also look to the major educational reformers of
Western Europe for inspiration and stimulation. Jean Jacques Rousseau, author of Emile, had
written about an education that proceeds along natural lines and is completely free of coercion.
As an early rebel against traditional schooling and classical education, Rousseau argued that
the child is naturally good and that learning is most effective when it follows the child's interests
and needs.
Progressives could also feel an affinity for the work of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, a nineteenth
century Swiss educational reformer, who, as a willing disciple of Rousseau, asserted that
education should be more than book learning. It should embrace the whole child --his emotions,
intellect, and body. Natural education, said Pestalozzi, should take place in an environment of
emotional love and security. It should also begin in the child's immediate environment and
involve the operations of the senses on the objects found in the environment.
The work of Sigmund Freud was also useful to progressive educators. In examining cases of
hysteria, Freud traced the origins of mental illnesses to early childhood. Authoritarian parents
and home environments cause many children to repress their drives. This repression, especially
in the case of sexual drives, can lead to neurotic behavior that has a deleterious effect upon the
child and upon his adult life.
While the European educational reformers provided stimulus for progressive educators, it was
John Dewey and his followers who came to exert a profound influence on progressive
education. It should be noted, however, that not all-progressives were Deweyites. Progressive
education as a movement was a convenient platform, a rallying point, for those who opposed
educational traditionalism: it was not a doctrinaire movement. It drew its inspiration frorn the
European naturalist educators, such as Rousseau and Pestalozzi, from Freudian and neo-
Freudian psychoanalytic theory, from currents of American political and social reformism, as
well as from John Dewey's Pragmatic Instrumentalism.
The Progressive Educational Platform Before commenting on John Dewey's reactions to
progressive education as a movement, a short review of the history of the progressive education
movement is useful for understanding the work of the progressive educators. Certain educators,
such as Flora Cooke, principal of the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago, and Carleton
Washburne of the Winnetka Schools, had in the early twentieth century developed innovative
methods that stressed the child's own initiative in learning. Junius L. Meriam of the University of
Missouri had developed an activity curriculum that was related to the child's life and included
excursions, constructive work, observation, and discussion. Marietta Johnson had also
established the School of Organic Education in 1907 in Fairhope, Alabama. Johnson's organic
theory of education emphasized the child's needs, interests, and activities. Special attention
was given to creative activity that included dancing, sketching, drawing, singing, weaving, and
other expressive activities. Formal instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic was reserved
until the child was nine or ten years old. The general method of instruction was that of the free-
flowing discussion.
In the winter of 1918-1919, a number of progressive educators met in Washington, D.C. and
formed the Progressive Education Association, under the leadership of Standwood Cobb, head
of the Chevy Chase Country Day School. To give cohesion to the progressive educational
position, the Association stressed the following principles: (1) progressive education should
provide the freedom that would encourage the child's natural development and growth through
activities which cultivate his initiative, creativity, and self-expression; (2) all instruction should be
guided by the child's own interest, stimulated by contact with the real world; (3) the progressive
teacher is to guide the 'child's learning as a director of research activities, rather than a drill Or
task master; (4) student achievement is to be measured in terms of rnental-physical, moral, and
social development; (5) there should be greater cooperation between the teacher and school
and the home and the family in meeting the child's needs for growth and development; (6) the
truly progressive school should be a laboratory in innovative educational ideas and practices."

At the onset, the Progressive Education Association was clearly a child-centered movement
which was a reaction against the subjectmatter orientation of traditional education. It attracted to
its ranks teachers and parents associated with small private experimental schools. In the late
1920s and in the 1930s, the Progressive Education Association attracted proffessional
educators from colleges of education. Many of these educators were familiar with and had been
influenced by John Dewey's experimentalist philosophy of education.

DEWEY'S CRITIQUE OF PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION

Although the major ideas of John Dewey's experimentalism have already been treated, the
progressive educational position can be made clearer by a brief examination of the critique of
the movement that was contained in Dewey's Experience and Education.

Dewey warned that the controversy between traditional and progressive educators tended to
degenerate into an assertion of either-or positions. Although generally sympathetic to
progressivism, he felt that many progressives were merely reacting against traditional school
practices and had failed to formulate an educational philosophy which was capable of serving
as a plan of pragmatic operations.
Dewey's analysis of the traditional' and the progressive school is useful in highlighting the
contrasts between these two institutions. The traditional school, he said, is a formal institution
that emphasizes a subject matter curriculum, comprised of bodies of discretely organized
disciplines, such as language, history, mathematics, and science. The traditionalists hold that
the source of wisdom was located in man's cultural heritage. Morals, standards, and conduct
are derived from tradition and are not exposed to the test of contemporary requirements. The
traditional teacher regards the written word as the source of wisdom, and relies on the textbook
as the source of knowledge and the recitation as the means of eliciting it from the students.
Traditionalists attempt to isolate the school from social controversies. In their belief that learning
is the transmission and mastery of bodies of knowledge inherited from the past, the
traditionalists ignore the learner's own needs and interests and deliberately neglect pressing
social and political issues. The products of conventional education are expected to be receptive
of the traditional wisdom, to have habits and attitudes that are conducive to conformity, and to
be respectful and obedient to authority.
Although Dewey shared the Progressives' antagonism to the traditional school, he feared that
many Progressives were merely reacting against it. Too many Progressives ignored the past
and were concerned only with the present. In their opposition to the traditional school's
passivity, some progressives came to emphasize any kind of activity, even purposeless activity.
Many progressives became so antagonistic to education which was imposed by adults on
children that they began to cater to childish whims, many of which were devoid of social and
intellectual purposes.
After urging that Progressive educators avoid entanglement in the polarization of an either-or
cduc.uional position, Dewey outlined the philosophy which he believed was suited for the
genuinely progressive school. In many ways, his message reiterates the basic premises that
had been voiced in Democracy and Education. Progressive education needs a philosophy
based upon experience. the interaction of the person with his environment. Such an experiential
philosophy should have no set of external aims or goals. Rather, the end product of education is
growth that on-going experience which leads to the direction and control subsequent
experience.
Truly progressive education should not ignore the past but should rather use it as an instrument
that would lead to the reconstruction of experience in the present and would direct the course of
subsequent experiences. For Dewey, education should be based on a continuum of on-going
experience that unites the past and the present and leads to the shaping of the future.
Dewey also warned that Progressive education should not become so absorbed in activity that it
misconstrues the nature of activity. More movement is without value. Activity should be directed
to the solution of problems: it should be purposeful and should contain social and intellectual
possibilities that are contributory to the learner's growth':

The genuinely progressive educator is a teacher who is skilled relating the learner's internal
conditions of experience-his needs, interests, purposes, capacities, and desires-with the
objective conditions experience-the environmental factors that are historical, physical,
economic, and sociological.

Above all, Dewey asserted progressivism should free itself from blind and naive romanticization
of the child's nature. While the child's interests and needs are always the initial points of
learning, the child's impulses are the beginnings of intelligence and not its end. In the
problematic situation, the child's impulses are blocked by obstacles that impede the satisfaction
of his drive. Some impulses contain possibilities that would lead to the child's growth and
development: other impulses have consequences that impede such growth. Impulse becomes
reflective and intelligent when the learner is able to estimate the consequences of acting upon it.
By developing "end-in-view,' the learner can conjecture the consequences that will result by
acting in a given manner. The forming of purpose involves an estimation of consequences that
have occurred from acting in similar situations in the past and a tentative judgment about the
likely consequences of acting on impulse in the present situation. Progressive education should
encourage the cultivation of purposeful, reflective habits of inquiry in the learner. As he
concluded Experience and Education, Dewey wrote:
I see at bottom but two alternatives between which education must choose if it is not to drift
aimlessly. One of them is expressed by the attempt to induce educators to return to the
intellectual methods and ideals that arose centuries before scientific method was developed.
The appeal may be temporarily successful in a period when general insecurity, emotional and
intellectual as well as economic is rife. For under these conditions the desire to lean on fixed
authority is active. Nevertheless, it is so out of touch with all the conditions of modern life that
believe it is follv to seek salvation in this direction. The other alternative is systematic utilization
of scientific method as the pattern and ideal of intelligent exploration and exploitation of the
potentialities inherent in experience."

WILLIAM HEARD KILPATRICK AND THE PROJECT METHOD

'Dewey's plea that progressive education develop a philosophy of education that would become
a plan of purposeful activity to guide experience stimulated William Heard Kilpatrick, who was
both an Experimentalist and a Progressive, to construct a methodology of instruction that unites
activity and purpose. Kilpatrick, who was a popular lecturer at Teachers College of Colurnbia
University, developed the project method, which came to characterize the best of progressive
education for many American educators.
A brief discussion of Kilpatrick's route to the development of the project method is useul in
understanding the progressive impulse among American educators. Kilpatrick was born in 1871
in White Plains, in rural Georgia, the son of a Baptist minister. He received a traditional
education. After attending Mercer University, he taught algebra and geometry in the public
schools of Blakely in his native state."
As a mathematics teacher, Kilpatrick inaugurated it series of reforms in his classroom. For
example, he believed that the practices associated with report cards and grades focused
attention on extrinsic rewards that were not connected with the natural consequences of
learning. He abolished the practice of external marks, which he felt encouraged egotism among
the achievers and inflicted a sense of inferiority on the slower learners. In cultivating a sense of
freedom in his classes, he encouraged his students to work cooperatively on their assignments.
Early in his career as aclassroom teacher, Kilpatrick revealed a liberal attitude to discipline
which would later be more theoretically and systematically organized in the project method.
In 1907, Kilpatrick went to Teachers College, Columbia University, to continue his professional
and academic preparation in education. Here he encountered and accepted John Dewey's
pragmatic philosophical orientation.
Later, as a professor of education at Teachers College, Kilpatrick became a noted interpreter of
Dewey. His writing and lecturing, which exposited themes associated with experimentalist
philosophy and the progressive educational posture, attracted a large and receptive audience. A
gifted lecturer, Kilpatrick was able to clarify many of Dewey's more difficult theoretical concepts.
He was not, however, only an interpreter but also advanced his own educational philosophy,
which synthesized progressivism and experimentalism into what came to be referred to as the
purposeful act, or the project method. Because he reached such a large number of teachers in
his classes, Kilpatrick came to exert a shaping influence over American educational theory and
practice.
Kilpatrick's project method of education must be interpreted in terms of his rejection of traditional
education's reliance on a book-centered learning program. Although he was not antiintellectual,
Kilpatrick asserted that books are not a substitute for learning through living. The most
pernicious form of bookishness is found in the textbook's domination of much conventional
school practice. Too frequently teachers rely exclusively on the information contained in
textbooks that are often mechanically organized, second-hand experiences. The student who
succeeds in the traditional school situation is frequently one who is of a bookish inclination and
successful in memorizing but not always in understanding the content which he reads. Because
of its stress on bookishness and memorization, conventional schooling degenerated into a
devitalized mechanical set of routines where teachers assign lessons from textbooks, drill their
students on the assignments, hear recitations of memorized responses, and then evaluate them
on the basis of their adherence to the predigested textbook formulae. Such schooling is
dangerous, in Kilpatrick's view, because it fails to encourage individual creativity, it contributes
to boredom, and it is devoid of cooperative social purposes.
In contrast to the authoritarianism and rote nature of traditional book-centered education,
Kilpatrick devised the project method, which was designed to elaborate a constructive
progressivism along experimentalist lines. In the project method, students are encouraged to
choose, plan, direct, and execute their work in activities, or projects, which can bring forth the
student's purposeful efforts. In its theoretical formulation, the project is a mode of problem
solving. Students, either as individuals or in groups, would define problems that arise in their
own experience. The learning effort would be task-centered in that success would come by the
resolution of the problem and the testing of the solution by acting upon it. Action that results
from purposeful planning would meet the pragmatic test and would be judged by the
consequences that it produces.
Kilpatrick recommended that the school curriculum be organized in terms of four major classes
of projects: (1) The creative or construction project involves the concretizing of a theoretical plan
in external form. For example, the students might decide to write and to present a drama. They
would write the script, assign the roles, and actually present the play. Or the creative project
might actually involve the design of a blueprint for a library. The test would come in the
construction of the library from the plan devised by the students. (2) The appreciation or
enjoyment project is designed to contribute to the cultivation of aesthetic experience. Reading a
novel, seeing a film, or listening to a symphony are examples of projects that would lead to
aesthetic enjoyment and appreciation. (3) The problem project is one in which the students
would be involved in the resolving of an intellectual difficulty. Such problems as the resolution of
racial discrimination, the improvement of the quality of the environment, or the organization of
recreational facilities are social problems that call for disciplined intellectual inquiry. (4) The
specific learning project involves acquiring a skill or an area of knowledge. Learning to type, to
swim, to dance, to read, or to write are examples of the acquisition of a specific skill.
Kilpatrick's project method should be interpreted in terms of its suggested social consequences
as well as its strictly educational aims. To be sure, the project method has educational
objectives, such as improvement in creative, constructive, appreciative, intellectual, and skill
competencies. However, the acquiring of these competencies is only a part of Kilpatrick's plan
for educational reform. Kilpatrick believed, as did Dewey, that education as a social activity is a
product of human association and sharing. In a free society, the democratic method of peaceful
discussion, debate, decision, and action depends on the willingness of individuals to use the
methods of open and uncoerced inquiry. Kilpatrick believed that the project rnethod lends itself
to group work, in which students could cooperatively pursue common problems and share in
associative inquiry - the essence of the democratic processes. Even more important than the
acquiring of specific skills, the student should acquire the dispositions that are appropriate to life
in a democratic society.
The product that Kilpatrick envisioned as a result of the program of education based on
purposeful activity is the democratic man or woman. Such a person would have an experimental
attitude and would be willing to test inherited traditions, values, and beliefs. Through the mutual
sharing and solving of problems in the project method, students would learn to use the
democratic methods of open discussion, carefully reasoned deliberation, decision making that
respects both the rights of the majority and the minority, and action that results in peaceful
social change. Kilpatrick's model of the democratic citizen is much like that envisioned by the
middle-class progressives in politics and in education.
He would use a democratic methodology and would expect his opponents to use the same
procedures. As a reconstructive person, progressively educated man and woman would
recognize that social institutions are creations of human intelligence and could be periodically
renovated when the times require it. The democratic citizen would be open to the use of the
scientific method and would discard theological, metaphysical, political, and economic absolutes
as dogmatic impediments which block human inquiry into the conditions of life. Above all
Kilpatrick wanted to educate individuals who are sharers in a common framework of democratic
values. Such men and women would be whole-hearted and willing participants in the democratic
community.